Redlands Community Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s 2018 Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award with Target: StrokeSM Honor Roll. The award recognizes the hospital’s commitment to ensuring stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence. This is the third consecutive year that Redlands Community Hospital has earned the gold level recognition.
Hospitals receiving Get With The Guidelines Gold Plus Achievement Award have reached an aggressive goal of treating stroke patients with 85 percent or higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for 24 consecutive months. In addition, those hospitals have demonstrated 75 percent compliance to seven out of ten stroke quality measures during the 12-month period.
“Every second counts when a patient is experiencing a stroke,” said Gayle Belardo, stroke center coordinator at Redlands Community Hospital. “This recognition demonstrates Redlands Community Hospital’s commitment to delivering advanced life-saving stroke treatments to patients quickly and safely. We continue to strive for excellence and this acknowledgment from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s further validates our team’s hard work.”
To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll, hospitals must meet quality measures developed to reduce the time between the patient’s arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat stroke. If given in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA has been shown to significantly reduce the effects of stroke and lessen the chance of permanent disability.
These quality measures are designed to help hospital teams follow the most up-to-date, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients.
“We are pleased to recognize Redlands Community Hospital for their commitment to stroke care,” said Eric E. Smith, M.D., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines Steering Committee and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. “Research has shown that hospitals adhering to clinical measures through the Get With The Guidelines quality improvement initiative can often see fewer readmissions and lower mortality rates.”
In efforts to continue to improve the services it offers to stroke patients, Redlands Community Hospital will soon apply to become a Comprehensive Stroke Centers (CSCs), giving the hospital the ability to perform mechanical thrombectomy. Thrombectomy, used to treat ischemic stroke, is a highly specialized catheter-based procedure to remove the blood clot in the brain.
Stroke experts estimate that 20 percent or more of severe stroke patients should receive thrombectomies, but in some parts of the country, as few as 2 percent receive it. This is primarily due to a lack of resources and training to perform the procedure.
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds, someone dies of a stroke every four minutes, and nearly 800,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.